Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is getting cold feet over a proposed €1.5 billion ($1.6 billion) deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, according to Bloomberg News. As well she might.
What seemed initially like a chance for Rome to build ties with the Trump administration and boost its technological expertise looks now like a threat to security and sovereignty as the US billionaire-industrial complex turns hostile on trade, NATO and Ukraine. In recent days, the US has paused intelligence-sharing with Kyiv as part of an arm-twisting exercise on natural resources and ceasefire talks; cutting off access to SpaceX’s satellite-communications network Starlink was also reportedly threatened, though this was denied by Musk.
Dependence on the company’s 6,000 satellites feels dangerous as well as humiliating, given it combines a geopolitical kill switch with the megaphone effect of the Twitter platform Musk also owns. He has toughened his propaganda against European leaders, whom he accuses of fomenting a “forever war” with Russia, and Canada, where one province is ripping up its Starlink contract. It will only accelerate the Franco-German push to mobilize trillions of euros in additional defense funds and extend nuclear deterrence, upending the post-1989 consensus. “It’s now or never,” Axel Voss, a member of the European Parliament who belongs to German Chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz’s party, told me this week in his Brussels office, calling for more autonomy in tech and defense.
But this gets to the really daunting challenge facing leaders gathering in Brussels on Thursday: To what extent can the European Union and partners like the UK or Norway build a credible deterrent against Russia without US support? The world’s biggest military spender and economy accounts for 70% of NATO capabilities; it’s been key to the freezing of $280 billion in Russian assets, the enforcement of sanctions, the supply of arms and tech. These are gaps that are going to take a lot of time, money and unity to fill.
The world of satellites is especially relevant to modern militaries and vital for drone warfare. Shares of Eutelsat Communications SACA, which bought Starlink’s British rival OneWeb, have soared 237% in three days on hopes that there’s a European SpaceX waiting in the wings. Yet even this gain has only taken its market capitalization to €3.2 billion, a fraction of SpaceX’s (private-market) valuation of $350 billion. Like the European space sector overall, Eutelsat is held down by the weight of the past: Half its revenue still comes from legacy video operations like satellite television, increasingly displaced by on-demand apps like Netflix Inc. And while Starlink has slung thousands of satellites into orbit, benefiting from its parent company’s dominance in launches, OneWeb has fewer than 700. It will take years and many billions to catch up; as some Canadians are finding out, there are few alternatives today.
The way forward is going to involve some compromises. If speed is of the essence, Europe should splurge on hundreds of new satellite orders while also swallowing its pride and stepping up bookings with SpaceX to actually get them into orbit, reckons political scientist Francesco Nicoli of think tank Bruegel. Elsewhere, sanctions on Russia will have to be negotiated without US enforcement, while not being blindly dropped. Contingency planning for a NATO that’s suffering from the “brain death” French President Emmanuel Macron warned about in 2019 will need a rethink in terms of troop planning, intelligence and threat assessment. And a Europe squeezed by both Washington and Moscow may have to put its own interests first in dealing with other powers like China on matters like export curbs, says Hans Kribbe, an analyst at the Brussels Institute for Geopolitics.
What Europe can’t do is reverse course. Going back to the pre-pandemic, prewar model of reliance on cheap Russian gas, US security guarantees and China export markets would be hugely risky and destabilizing, regardless of the nostalgia that exists in some corners for what it offered Europe in terms of “competitiveness.” Still, de-risking while de-Musking the economy is no easy task.
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